Feedback Style

Please feel free to leave me feedback, reveal my blindspots to me, help me improve. You can even do it anonymously, its just a Google Form. If you'd like to talk about something in real time please schedule some shared time with me.

• I want any and all feedback and I’d rather risk getting feedback in painful ways than to not get the feedback because you were unsure about how to provide it. It’s easier if we have a relationship where I trust you and know you have my best interest at heart but I’ll take feedback from people who don’t have my best interest at heart and assess it in its own right if it brings me closer to reality. That being said, difficult conversations are far more grounded for me in person or over a video call.
• I will absolutely take your feedback to heart (look, I'm sensitive ok?). If you give me feedback I will take it very seriously and adapt. Consequently I ask that you are deliberate and sincere when giving me feedback.

Style

• I care a lot. Often because I am so emotionally invested in what I do for work I can sometimes get discouraged or frustrated if things aren’t going well. It also means it is really hard for me not to provide feedback if I think things can be better. This feeling is particularly bad when I feel like I have little to no control to influence or change things. I do best if I’m heard and given a domain to truly own.
• I really value being genuine and honest. So much so that sometimes I can come across more negative than I intend to because I’d rather be transparent than artificially positive. I’d also prefer to share in someone’s honest suffering than have my perception attempted to be managed. If I’m talking ad nauseum about the same things or zapping your energy, please tell me.
• I want meaningful friendships not distant professional relationships. Somes I can be a bit too personal for some people’s taste because by default I want a meaningful friendship and connection with everyone I meet. If I ever make you uncomfortable please feel free to share that you’d prefer to keep things professional.
• I want mastery. Sometimes this can come across a bit idealistic or hard to please. I don’t do very well in tasks or roles that aren’t challenging for me. I’d much prefer the pain of challenge than the pain (or comfort) of boredom. I really need the ability to experiment and control how I work in the form of tools, environments & techniques.
• I finish what I start. It is very important for me to see a task all the way through to end users before moving to the next one. I call this optimization for flow efficiency. I don’t believe working on many things concurrently is effective.

Values

• Autonomy. The ability to experiment and control how I work in the form of tools, environments & techniques.
• Mastery. I will not work on projects in which I am not growing personally in one dimension or another.
• Impact. I must have the ability to be true to myself and pursue making my biggest impact with intensity. Not tempered and mitigated into a particular role.
• Reality. I’ll choose a painful reality over a comfortable delusion 100% of the time.
• Action. I have a huge bias towards action. I believe reality is the great iconoclast. The only way to check your model for reality is to test it with action. The sooner you learn you’re wrong, the better.
• Authenticity, compassion & vulnerability. I want to work in an environment that makes me feel like a human to be protected, not a resource to be exploited. Somewhere that trusts me. A place that is externally competitive (not internally.) Incentive structures shouldn't encourage politics.
• Craftsmanship. Not doing my best work is a disgrace to the privilege I have of doing it.
• Growth. Please. Teach. Me.

Repulsions

• Arrogance.
• Meanness.
• When people phone it in.
• When someone won't lead, follow or get out of the way. Complaining from the sidelines.
• When a company or someone else treats me as a resource to leverage and not an agent pursuing a shared goal.
• Optimization for personal advancement over the collective goals of the company.
• Generalizations. It is tempting for people to generalize their experience, reality is often far more nuanced and I struggle when the pursuit of reality is frustrated by someones false generalizations. Some examples include, rigid code style guides, solving problems and processes in "theory", etc.
• Process for process sake. Doing things for false comfort. Reality is uncertain and difficult to predicit, that is an uncomfortable reality. I’d rather embrace the uncomfortable reality and adjust process and tooling around it to optimize for the desired outcome. Unless it is truely the right tool for the context I find ready-made practices like burn down charts, distant deadlines, velocity measurements, task voting, etc worse than a waste of time.

Decision Making Style

• Start with my values and determine a desired outcome. Find out what is true. Determine what to do about it. Bias towards action and leverage the results to correct my world view about what is true. I tend to rely on probability, data, risk/reward analysis, etc… Success in a metric I don't value would be worse than failure in something I do.